... because TM1 In The Cloud seems to be the way we're heading (eventually, even if it's really unusable with Perspectives at present) anyway, but if true this is going to shudder through a lot of local economies in the US and probably have an effect on the morale within IBM:

IBM is expected to go through a massive reorg next month that will reportedly see 26% of its 430,000-strong work force let go, or 111,800 people. If that figure holds true, that would make it far and away the largest corporate layoff event in history, breaking the record previously held by IBM, when it cut 60,000 in 1993.

The report comes from long-time Silicon Valley journalist Robert X. Cringely, who recently published an eBook on IBM's issues entitled The Decline and Fall of IBM. He blamed past CEOs Louis Gerstner and Sam Palmisano for making the mess and current CEO Virginia Rometty has done nothing to address them.

The problem is a complex mess of bad management – like laying off important people in the middle of a project – to getting sidetracked with pie-in-the-sky ideas like commercializing Watson and failing to adjust to the new era. The "M" in IBM may mean machines, but hardware is less than 10% of its business. Two-thirds is in services, and the services pipeline has dried up.

Why? Well, according to an ex-IBMer I spoke to some time ago, who confirmed what Cringely wrote in his book, IBM is still wedded to services contracts in an age where companies are shutting down their internal data center entirely and moving everything to the cloud. If you don't have a data center, you don't need an IBM service contract to manage it.